Photo: Greg Norman

What’s the Purpose of Your Life?

Ivor Tymchak
Sep 4, 2018 · 8 min read

“’Tymchak’, that’s an unusual name. Where’s it from?”

When people ask me this question my usual response is, “My dad.”

“No, no, what I mean is — “

“Ah, you mean its origin. But as I’m now talking about my dad let me tell you an interesting story about him.” And I tell them the story.

My dad came from Ukraine. He lived in a small village way out in the sticks. As a young man he tried to tame a feral horse he’d captured and during the struggle the horse threw him off its back and my dad hit his head on a rock when he landed. He hit his head so hard he was knocked unconscious. When he came round a few minutes later he had total amnesia — couldn’t remember a thing about himself. To try and jog his memory his family and friends kept telling him stories about his past. And this is where the story gets really interesting.

My father told me that as they fed him these stories about his life, he would listen to them with complete dispassion. He had no emotional investment in the stories so when he was told one about his childhood, for example, he would think about the story in terms of whether he liked it or not.

One story his mother told him was about a scar he had on his forearm. It resulted from a fight he once had with another boy from the village when they were both about six years old. The other boy bit him in the fight and that’s why he had the scar on his forearm. In the story, my father lost the fight and went home crying from the pain.

My father told me that when he heard this story he didn’t like the ending of it so in his mind he decided to change it and in his version he got so mad after the boy had bitten him that he thrashed him mercilessly so that he went home crying to his mother. Because he had no emotional investment in the original version of the story he discovered he could just as easily believe in his version of the story and he noticed that he always felt better about himself afterwards with the revised version.

During that period of memory loss he had the opportunity to write his own back-story so that it fitted his personality better.

Over time, his memory slowly returned to him but in that brief moment of being able to write his own life story he learnt a valuable lesson: your life isn’t ‘fixed’.

Indeed, it proved invaluable a few years later when the Second World War engulfed his country. After many adventures and perilous journeys he eventually found himself in England without a penny and barely able to speak the language. What was he going to do?

He remembered the power of creating stories so he reinvented himself once more but this time he imagined himself as a watchmaker. He had an interest in the mechanisms of clocks so he simply told himself he was a watchmaker. During his travels across Europe he had picked up several languages so the first books he studied on horology were in German but then as he acquired the English language he studied English books too. Over time his expertise in watch repair became so proficient and so well known amongst his circle of friends that he was able to give up the unskilled manual work he did to earn a living and replace it with this highly skilled work that he preferred.

You can be the author of your future too, just write the stories that you would like to be true.

Now, you might say, you’d love to do that BUT… and you trot out all the excuses that prevent you from doing what you want to do. You have well-rehearsed stories that tell you why it’s just not possible and some of these stories I’m sure are compelling. But they’re still excuses and in a world that has no meaning, excuses are worthless.

The thing is, when you have purpose, the power of your purpose fights against the power of your excuses: if your purpose is strong enough, it will defeat all of your excuses.

Let me tell you my story.

As a kid I loved making marks. The more I did this activity the more attention I received — people would encourage me to do more as they could see I enjoyed it so much. Eventually the marks became recognisable as objects drawn from the real world and the comments became more positive: “I wish I could draw like that. That’s so lifelike. You’re a really good artist.”

Then at secondary school I started to get special attention. The art teacher recognised my talent and took me under his wing and made sure opportunities to create more art were pushed my way. The art teacher became my mentor.

Then during one particular art lesson I remember I was wandering over to the sink to wash some brushes with turpentine. I had to use turps because I had been painting with oils. Very few students got to use oil paints: they were too expensive to just mess around with. The teacher was in the middle of telling the class off. I only became aware of this when the teacher called my name. He asked me how many preparatory drawings I’d used for the composition of my current oil painting that was now glistening on an easel near the window. Four or five I said. That’s when I took in my surroundings and noticed all the class were sat down at their desks looking sullen as the teacher was berating them.

That’s when I realised my talent had given me a special position in the class: the ordinary rules didn’t apply to me. The teacher knew I had purpose and he only needed to apply the lightest touch to steer that purpose on the right course to maximize its potential. Does any of this sound familiar to anyone?

After Secondary school I went to grammar school to do ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels. Once again I created a privileged position for myself through art. My art teacher there also encouraged me and started to extend my network: he introduced me to other teachers in the school who were interested in art and the complimentary comments I heard directed towards me developed into something new: “How much would you want for that drawing?”

Whoaa! That was a pleasant surprise. I was amazed I could actually get paid for doing something I enjoyed doing — that’s the dream, right?

Most of my works were completed at home (not as homework but as my own assignments) and I would bring them in to show the art teacher. More often than not he would take the artwork, frame it and hang it up somewhere in the school.

The deputy head was one of the teachers who bought works from me. One work of art that I was executing at school was ‘sold’ to the geography teacher before I had even finished the piece. The art teacher too, bought one of my works.

Then I met a motivational speaker who explained a profound truth to me and what he said that day has stayed with me ever since. I can’t remember the speaker’s name and he wasn’t on a big stage when he told me the profound truth because at the time, it was just he and I stood on the grass of the playing fields during lunchtime. He was another student at the school and he was an up and coming runner who’d won every competition in the school and was now making a name for himself in the region. As a result he too enjoyed privilege status within the school — I guess that’s partly why we got to know each other.

We were chatting generally about the subject of running and what his next big competition was going to be. He then said this: “You know, a lot of my friends tell me that they could be good runners and compete at County level and I say to them, ‘Yes, you probably could if you did the training but you don’t do the training and that’s the difference between you and me — I do the hard work.’”

This comment gave me a profound insight: my artistic ‘talent’ was derived from exactly the same process. Everyone has the potential to be a good artist; they just need to put the time in for the hard work of training. Except I never thought of it as hard work: it was difficult sometimes, frustrating for sure and often a daunting challenge, but work? — Never. And the reason I never thought of it as work was because I had purpose. I wanted to create art.

The runner had purpose too and so he and I saw the practice sessions as a necessary part of the journey and we accepted this fact without complaint.

A successful career in art was now beckoning. The next stage was attending Art College.

Art College though, changed everything.

Here, I was exposed to a wonderful world of creative possibilities — filmmaking, writing, performing, rock n roll … and I got distracted.

If you want to become truly successful at something you need to focus your purpose on developing that one skill: you keep practicing, extend your network, get good at marketing and time will ultimately deliver the rewards. But this success is usually only measured in financial returns.

In our society, this metric commands most respect. But what if your purpose is broader than this? What if you want to explore other lives, other careers? Your financial returns won’t be as good but your sense of living a full life will be incalculable.

You see, life has no meaning: it’s just a bunch of stories — powerful stories, for sure, but stories nonetheless. Whether they’re true or not is irrelevant, they only exist to help you make sense of the world.

Purpose, however, is different. Your purpose is inviolable. No one can take it away from you or call it false because you own it in the fibre of your being. It doesn’t rely on anything else for its existence. It’s the one thing that is incorruptible.

My time on this page is up. Your time on this earth however is still running and you can’t be sure how much longer you have left.

Find your purpose and listen to it — what does it say to you? Does it cry, ‘what’s my story? Please, write me the story where I can truly come alive!’

Remember, your purpose is the one thing that can’t lie to you. Trust it.

Ivor Tymchak

Written by

Freethinker, speaker and trainer of presentation skills.

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